Mending the Moon (23 page)

Anna and William and Marjorie and David will definitely be there. Anna's pretty sure that Karen-who-brought-back-Bart would come, too, if she were invited. Bart should be there, too. Anna wonders if the Unitarians will allow a dog in the sanctuary.

Percy's ashes are currently in a brown cardboard box in Anna's closet. It would be so much easier just to scatter them in the backyard, but that's not What's Done.

Or is it? The memorial service isn't about the disposition of the ashes. If they want to bury Percy in the backyard, they can. If they want to scatter him somewhere, they can do that, too. Where would he want to be scattered?

This suddenly seems like an urgent question. Anna can't believe she hasn't thought of it before. Since William's in the house, for once, maybe she should consult him. She stands up to go find him, but then remembers how he pulled his hand away from hers, how he walked away from her down the hall. He doesn't want to talk about Percy.

She sits down again and picks up the new issue.

*   *   *

On March 10, 2009, Melinda takes the day off work, an annual birthday treat. When Jeremy's in college, she'll be able to sleep in on her birthday, but since he's still in high school, she has to get up early to get him up, fed, and out the door.

She puts on a robe and pads downstairs, rapping on Jeremy's bedroom door on the way. “Jer! Up 'n' at 'em! Time's a wasting!” She thinks she hears a groan in response. If he's not in the kitchen in fifteen minutes, she'll come back up and roust him more forcefully.

Yawning, she starts the coffee, a peppermint chocolate roast she bought as a treat for today. It smells delicious, and she smiles when the odor starts to fill the kitchen.

“God, Mom. How can you
stand
that stuff?”

Jeremy, improbably, is awake and downstairs, standing scowling in his own bathrobe, a ratty blue terrycloth thing he refuses to let her replace.

“Good morning. You don't have to drink it.”

“I have to
smell
it.”

She decides to change the subject. “You're up early.”

“Spanish quiz. Michael and I are supposed to study before school.”

“Ah,” Melinda says, swallowing past her disappointment. She'd briefly entertained a fantasy that he'd come down to surprise her with a gift, or even just an offer to cook breakfast. He hasn't even said “happy birthday” yet. Has he forgotten? How could he?

There's still a chance that this is an elaborate ruse to surprise her, but the possibility's fading, and the longer she waits to remind him, the more embarrassed he'll be. She thinks. She hopes.

“Jer? You know what today is, right?”

He gives her such a blank look that she knows he's forgotten. Jeremy has no acting ability whatsoever. “Tuesday. It
is
Tuesday, isn't it? Yeah, it has to be, because yesterday was Monday, and—”

“March 10,” she says gently, and he blinks at her for a moment before panic blooms across his face.

“Oh, shit. Shit shit shit. Mom, I'm sorry. Happy birthday! I'm sorry.” He's blushing. “I didn't—I don't know how I—”

“It's okay, honey.” If nothing else, this means he'll be nice to her for the rest of the day. “It's okay. Just sit down and have a nice breakfast so you'll be ready for your Spanish quiz.”

“I'll cook!” he says, and he does, and it's good. Jeremy knows his way around an omelette. He throws together cheese, veggies, spices, all of it ordinary enough but in just the right quantities. He even pours Melinda's coffee, although he makes a great show of wrinkling his nose as he carries the mug to the table. He even tries to make conversation about the library. She appreciates the effort.

After he's left for school, she goes back upstairs for another part of her birthday ritual. A framed photograph of her parents sits on her dresser. They're very young in this picture, tan and lean, sitting in a rowboat smiling up at the camera. She doesn't know who took the shot, but her mother told her once that it was taken just after Melinda was conceived.

She carries the photograph downstairs, puts it on the kitchen table—which Jeremy cleared,
mirabile dictu
—and digs around in the cabinets until she finds a candle, which she lights. She sits in front of this makeshift altar and takes a deep breath.

“I miss you guys.” This is almost always how she begins these birthday speeches to her dead. Her father died of a heart attack when she was thirty-five, her mother of cancer five years later. Neither of them knew Jeremy, whom Melinda adopted when she was forty-five. “I wish you were here to see your grandson. He's eighteen now, and of course he thinks he's all grown up, but I know better, just like you knew better when I was that age. I wish you were here to give me advice.” She swallows. Some years she has a sense of their presence; some years she imagines full conversations with them. This year, they're mute.

She keeps talking for a while, anyway. When it seems clear that nothing's going to happen, she stops. Maybe next year.

When Jeremy was in his
Charlotte's Web
phase, terrified of death, she told him about this ritual, told him that you never really lose the people you love. You just can't see them anymore, and that's hard, but they're still with you. “It's like when we water the plants,” she told him. “The water sinks into the soil, and you can't see it, but it's still keeping the plants alive. Whenever we love people or they love us, the love sinks into us and helps us keep going, even when the people aren't here anymore.”

She wondered then if Jeremy understood what she meant. She wonders now if she still believes it.

She blows the candle out and carries the photograph back upstairs. The weather's crappy, chilly and unusually gray for Reno, but Melinda spends the day rereading several of the Mitford books, and she enjoys her peppermint chocolate coffee, and when Jeremy comes home, he brings her a card and some supermarket flowers. This weekend, she'll celebrate with Vera, who always drives her out to Gerlach and buys her a gorgeous piece of pottery, and at some point she hopes to celebrate with Rosie, who has her hands full with Walter at the moment. And she's pretty sure that next year, Jeremy will remember.

*   *   *

Melinda's birthday, and it has to fall on the Wednesday before spring break. This is the worst time of the semester. The students are exhausted. Veronique's exhausted. Everyone wants to be on vacation already, although the vacation's all too brief.

The only saving grace is that she knows at least a quarter of the class won't show up. Also, there's a class presentation scheduled for today. Veronique allows students to do these for extra credit; they're usually weak work, but they're much easier to grade than papers. And a presentation means that at least one student other than Amy Castillo will say something today.

Women & Violence has bombed. Veronique thought this topic would engage them, but it hasn't worked very well. They still misread even basic plot points in the books, stare in incomprehension when she tries to introduce anything remotely theoretical, and ignore her efforts to challenge toxic assumptions. Girls who dress slutty deserve to be raped—this from a young woman wearing skintight jeans and a corset—and battered women who don't just walk away from their abusers don't deserve any sympathy, and all lesbians hate men, and all feminists are lesbians.

When Veronique tries to challenge these notions, the students just glare at her mutely. Amy's a delight, but Amy already seems to know everything Veronique's trying to teach, and the problem with having one bright student in the class is that the others are sure to accuse Veronique of favoritism on the end-of-semester teaching evaluations. Amy doesn't need this class, and the others aren't learning anything—except maybe to despise Veronique—and it's Melinda's birthday, and all Veronique wants to do is stay home, or get out of town. Flight, flight. Ten times this morning she's been on the verge of calling in sick, but each time she's remembered this presentation. The presenter probably wouldn't mind a cancelation, but if Veronique cancels today, where will it stop? And anyway, she has other committee work piling up: junior faculty files to read for the tenure committee, a report to write on a new hire's service record. She could write the service report at home, but no one's allowed to remove the faculty files from the office.

She has to keep making herself go in. It's her job, and this is the last day before vacation.

So she goes to work, even getting there early so she can read the committee files before class. She speeds through them, reading just carefully enough to know which of the cases will prompt the most discussion—at least no one's actually up for tenure this year—but hangs on to the files for an extra forty-five minutes so the secretary will think she pored over them.

Then she hauls herself to class. As she expected, only twelve of her twenty students are here today. The presenter, a twitchy and entirely too thin young woman named Samantha, is setting up the electronic equipment at the front of the room. When she sees Veronique, she scowls and says, “It's not PowerPoint. I'm showing a film clip. And I know the running time doesn't count towards my ten minutes.”

“Very good,” says Veronique, giving Samantha what she hopes is a sufficiently warm smile. She sits in one of the student seats so she can watch with the rest of them. Evidently this presentation will fill up even more than ten minutes. Excellent.

The one male in the class, a lanky kid named Brent who only wears black and quite clearly has the hots for Samantha, says, “What's the clip from?”

“Sin City
.
”

Brent whistles and sits up a little straighter.
“Sweet!”
He looks like he actually plans to pay attention. Nothing Veronique's done all semester has gotten him to pay attention. He only stopped texting in class when Veronique threatened to confiscate his phone.

Sin City.
Veronique frowns, stabbed by a thin sliver of memory. Melinda. Something about Melinda. A shiver runs over the top of her skull. “When did this movie come out?”

“Four years ago,” Brent says. “It's
awesome
.”

Four years ago. Veronique remembers now: Jeremy wanted to see it, and Melinda said she'd go with him, and the film was so violent it made her almost physically ill. “It was disgusting,” she told Veronique. “Women were getting killed and the twenty-something guys sitting in front of me were moaning in pleasure, like they were having orgasms, and afterwards I tried to talk to Jeremy about it and he just rolled his eyes at me. ‘It's just a movie, Mom. C'mon, weren't the special effects cool?' He had no emotional response to the carnage
at all
. God, Vera! I always thought he was basically a good kid.”

Veronique takes a dizzy breath. “Samantha, you know presentations have to be on work by women. Remind me who made this movie?”

Samantha glares at her. “Well, there are female
characters
. And there were women in the cast and on the crew and everything. Doesn't that count?”

Brent snickers. “Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino.” Veronique's impressed; the child actually knows something.

Samantha's chin trembles. “It was a
collaboration
. Are you going to mark me down?”

The presentation checklist couldn't have been any clearer. All right, never mind: it's the Wednesday before break, and surely Samantha can't expect a good grade in the course given her performance to date, anyway. “Let's see it,” Veronique says, trying not to snap, trying to be kind. “Can you summarize your presentation for us, though, so we know what we're looking for?”

Samantha shoves a lock of dyed blond hair out of her face, looking slightly relieved. “It's about how there's violence to women at the beginning but then in the middle the guys fight the violence against women and at the end it looks like there's going to be violence again but the movie ends so you don't know.” She says this in a rush, in one breath. “So maybe something changed. I'm going to show the beginning, and then I'll talk about the middle, and then I'll show the end.”

“What,” says Brent, “the first segment? ‘The Customer Is Always Right'? Miller said the woman hired the guy to kill her. She had an affair with somebody dangerous who was going to kill her and she hired the Salesman to do it instead.”

“It's still
violent,
” Samantha says. “I'm just going to show it, all right?”

She shows it. Veronique watches in growing nausea: the man joining the woman on the balcony, their kiss, his shooting her. She imagines Melinda watching this four years ago. She feels herself begin to shake and sits trembling through the rest of Samantha's presentation, which would probably be incoherent even if every other sentence weren't being blocked out by static: flashes of Melinda's face, flashes of the pain she must have suffered as she died, flashes of newspaper images of Percy Clark, that smug young bastard.

After the presentation, Samantha asks if anyone has any questions. None of the other students do, although Veronique notes dimly that Amy's frowning. “I have a question,” Veronique says, and she almost doesn't recognize her own voice, as hoarse and cracked as a crow's cry. “That woman who dies. At the beginning. What's her name?”

Samantha blinks. “Well, she's just the Customer, like he's just the Salesman.”

“No,” Veronique says. “She is
not
just the Customer. If the story means anything at all, she was a person. She had a name. She had a birthday. When was her birthday, Samantha?”

Samantha rolls her eyes. “How should I know?” Some of the other students are laughing. Veronique knows they're laughing at her. She doesn't care.